In other news today...
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@lolwhat said in In other news today...:
@sockpuppet7 said in In other news today...:
When I used SMS sometimes the message would take more than 5 hours to be delivered.
must have shit mobile carriers, then. Us Uhmericans usually get SMS delivered within a few seconds, even if the sender and recipient are on different networks.SMS does not specify a required delivery time. Several years in the future is still perfectly in accordance with the specification (And I've had that happen a couple of times during the 1990s). It's a dumb as hell protocol that was one of those features just added on for no particular reason by people that had no idea what they were doing, and if you feel it is any good I challenge you to read the protocol specification. :D
That said, it is much like email, a defacto (well, not really...) standard for instant messaging on phones that is not going anywhere anytime soon because it's impossible to agree on an alternative even though several better protocols exist.
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Update :
Scottish castle reopens after '˜very angry badger' leaves
Part of a castle which was closed due to the presence of a 'very angry badger' has reopened.
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
Pharmaceutical
mafiacompanies
Doctors tried to lower $148K cancer drug cost; makers triple price of pill
“That got us kind of p---ed off,” doctor said after learning of price jump.
As patients don't have any government's boot on their heads that forces them to buy this stuff, we're obviously dealing with a free and voluntary exchange for mutual advantage here
Janssen picked the right market, too: as Goldman Sachs remarks on the question "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?":
In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.
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@carnage said in In other news today...:
SMS does not specify a required delivery time.
Well, sure... but at least here, in a mid-sized American metro, SMS messages generally move quickly. In fact, I work for a company - and plenty of other companies exist - that send SMS to customers with delivery time expected to be less than a minute.
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@lolwhat said in In other news today...:
@carnage said in In other news today...:
SMS does not specify a required delivery time.
Well, sure... but at least here, in a mid-sized American metro, SMS messages generally move quickly. In fact, I work for a company - and plenty of other companies exist - that send SMS to customers with delivery time expected to be less than a minute.
Yes, I know. I've also worked in telco and dealt with the crap quite closely. SMS and MMS should die a horrible death in agony, and be replaced by something better but that will never happen.
As for expecting that it will be delivered in less than a minute, yeha, typically that is true now. It can't be trusted to do that though.
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Restaurant slammed for posting name, email and mobile number of diner who didn’t turn up - then liking tweet branding her a 'selfish cow'
A CARDIFF restaurant has been slammed after it shared the personal details of a diner that didn’t turn up for their reservation. Bully’s Restaurant in Pontcanna posted a picture of dine…
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@boner Toby Faire, the restaurant is called "Bully's". I'd say if you book there you know what you're in for.
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When your product is perfect, you can waist time coding puzzles into it
Microsoft developers hid a secret puzzle in Windows backgrounds as they knew images would leak
Microsoft developers working on Windows 8 created a puzzle and embedded it in the wallpapers used for internal builds of the operating system.
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@laoc said in In other news today...:
@timebandit said in In other news today...:
Pharmaceutical
mafiacompanies
Doctors tried to lower $148K cancer drug cost; makers triple price of pill
“That got us kind of p---ed off,” doctor said after learning of price jump.
As patients don't have any government's boot on their heads that forces them to buy this stuff, we're obviously dealing with a free and voluntary exchange for mutual advantage here
Yeah. Those companies were selling at a rate to cover their costs and make a bit of profit and then the doctors conspired to drastically reduce the demand for the drug, meaning they would lose a ton of money.
Do people think that pharmaceuticals magically appear for free?
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@timebandit
Though at least they managed more than an open source product would have, and actually got the full puzzle deployed, rather than just switching formats and starting over in the new hotness every time they were one clue away from finishing
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
Those companies were selling at a rate to cover their costs and make a bit of profit and then the doctors conspired to drastically reduce the demand for the drug, meaning they would lose a ton of money.
We all know pharmaceuticals companies would never try to screw sick people
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
Those companies were selling at a rate to cover their costs and make a bit of profit and then the doctors conspired to drastically reduce the demand for the drug, meaning they would lose a ton of money.
We all know pharmaceuticals companies would never try to screw sick people
Sure, I could bring up irrelevant stories, too.
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@lolwhat said in In other news today...:
Well, sure... but at least here, in a mid-sized American metro, SMS messages generally move quickly. In fact, I work for a company - and plenty of other companies exist - that send SMS to customers with delivery time expected to be less than a minute.
Just like "it works on my machine".
Look, it's great if a technology works better than what the spec says, but if you're relying on it working better than what the spec says, you're gonna be disappointed sooner or later. You should use a technology whose spec provides the capability you need.
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@blakeyrat said in In other news today...:
if you're relying on it working better than what the spec says, you're gonna be disappointed sooner or later. You should use a technology whose spec provides the capability you need
No argument from me.
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@laoc said in In other news today...:
@timebandit said in In other news today...:
Pharmaceutical
mafiacompanies
Doctors tried to lower $148K cancer drug cost; makers triple price of pill
“That got us kind of p---ed off,” doctor said after learning of price jump.
As patients don't have any government's boot on their heads that forces them to buy this stuff, we're obviously dealing with a free and voluntary exchange for mutual advantage here
Yeah. Those companies were selling at a rate to cover their costs and make a bit of profit and then the doctors conspired to drastically reduce the demand for the drug, meaning they would lose a ton of money.
Do people think that pharmaceuticals magically appear for free?
Ibrutinib appears to be going generic in the next year or so. If they haven't made enough money off it yet, fuck em. This is just a shameless attempt to gouge consumers and eke out as much profit as they can, while they still can.
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Windows 95 in the wild
We don’t know what to do if a satellite gets hacked
It’s about to get very crowded up there, and cyberattacks pose a bigger threat than ever.
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Monkey can't sue for copyright infringement of selfies, 9th Circuit rules
A federal appeals court decided unanimously Monday that animals may not sue for copyright protection.
Lots of juicy stuff in the ruling. Of particular interest, the ruling smacked down PETA's attempt to claim "next friend" status. It nevertheless proceeded to weigh the merits of the case, and declared that
Naruto—and, more broadly, animals other than humans—lack statutory standing to sue under the Copyright Act.
edit: monkey selfie thread
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@anotherusername The footnotes on pp. 7-8 were particularly entertaining.
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@anotherusername I am relieved that the 9th Circuit showed common sense. Given its reputation as the nuttiest court in the land, I would not have been very surprised if it had gone the other way.
It is also interesting that the court would have liked to reject animals' standing to sue even more definitively than they did, but they were constrained by the 9th Circuit's nuttiness in a previous case.
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@carnage said in In other news today...:
SMS does not specify a required delivery time. [...]
That said, it is much like emailAnd in both SMS and email I've experienced rare occasions where there's been a delay of several hours for no discernible reason. At a previous job I'd submitted an application for an internal job posting by email, only to have it rejected because it had arrived well after the closing time - when I'd sent it hours before. Fortunately they were able to see that I had indeed sent it in time and allowed it to be considered (I didn't get the job in the end though). That one was pretty weird since it shouldn't have had to go outside our Exchange server. And at this job I once had a call from my manager as I was travelling into work along the lines of "uh, were you going to do anything about the job failure last night?" and my response was "wait, what job failure?"; the SMS alert eventually made it to my phone around mid to late morning, some 8-10 hours after it was sent.
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
When your product is perfect, you can waist time coding puzzles into it
Microsoft developers hid a secret puzzle in Windows backgrounds as they knew images would leak
Microsoft developers working on Windows 8 created a puzzle and embedded it in the wallpapers used for internal builds of the operating system.
I must be particularly dumb today, I don't understand the origin nor the solution of the puzzle... Well, I understand that it's a sudoku with lettres (including a duplicated one, might be fun to see if the puzzle relies on this duplication or if it would also work with another symbol), but I'm missing some references.
Can anyone explain what is the "typographic grid" that he is referring to (and that supposedly serves as inspiration for the puzzle)? Also, in the Twitter thread about the solution of the puzzle he says the solution is "Start me up", does anyone see how the solved puzzle relates to that phrase?
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
Windows 95 in the wild
We don’t know what to do if a satellite gets hacked
It’s about to get very crowded up there, and cyberattacks pose a bigger threat than ever.
Wow, that was painful to read.
these outdated systems makes old satellites prime targets for cyber attacks.
A malicious actor could fake their IP address, which gives information about a user’s computer and its location. This person could then get access to the satellite’s computer system,
Hmmm, faking your IP address is the only thing you need to get access? Sounds unlikely, but possible I suppose...
and manipulate where the satellite goes or what it does.
Uh, "where it goes" is basically "around and around". You're not going to be changing that very much.
Alternatively, an actor could jam the satellite’s radio transmissions with earth, essentially disabling it.
The cost of such an attack could be huge. If a satellite doesn’t work, life-saving GPS or online information could be withheld to people on earth when they need it most.
I know there are many times when my life has depended on the availability of GPS and Wikipedia. I just can't bring any to mind right now... (OK, GPS maybe, for emergency services, assuming an attack knocked out several GPS satellites at once. I still wouldn't call this a "huge" cost.)
What’s worse, if part of a satellite—or an entire satellite—is knocked out of its orbit from an attack, the debris could create a domino effect and cause extreme damage to other satellites.
How are you going to knock part of a satellite out of its orbit with a cyberattack?
But scientists also can’t access the computer systems of these satellites from earth
Uh. But hackers apparently can?
Since space is a vacuum, a piece of trash the size of a tortilla chip could dent and severely damage a satellite.
And here I thought it was all about relative velocities.
Most of the article appears to be based on discussions with two lawyers (one academic and one corporate), a less than natural seeming source. Unsurprisingly, after the scare tactics the article spends most of its time talking about the legal framework around any such hypothetical attacks and possible responses, basically boiling down to:
(1) Relevant treaties don't say very much
(2) There probably are policies in place, but we don't know what they are
(3) But somehow we're certain that it's not being taken seriously enough
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@scarlet_manuka said in In other news today...:
And in both SMS and email I've experienced rare occasions where there's been a delay of several hours for no discernible reason.
I've seen an SMS be delayed for around 9–10 months. It was really confusing, as it meant that the lady who'd sent it (and who was subsequently about to visit us) delivered something that sort of made sense but didn't actually and really just confused everyone when we phoned her up to discuss what she meant. Once we figured out that it was from the summer before, everything became much clearer.
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@remi I had to poke around a bit in the thread to see it, but it is explained there.
Basically it's a Sudoku-like puzzle with a 9x9 grid, solved in the normal Sudoku way except that there are two Ss in each set.
The full set of letters is DLOQRSSTZ. If you add one to each letter (wrapping around from Z to A) you get EMPRSTTUA, which can be rearranged as STARTMEUP.
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@scarlet_manuka Oh, right, I did not see the +1 bit. Thanks!
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Boy, 12, steals credit card and goes on Bali holiday after fight with mother
Sydney boy boarded flight alone to Perth, then another to Indonesia, where he checked into the All Seasons hotel
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@scarlet_manuka said in In other news today...:
Wow, that was painful to read.
If you want a better analysis, this came up in my research recently and I thought it was pretty good:
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@boner said in In other news today...:
http://www.alphr.com/space/1009170/uranus-eggy-farts-hydrogen-sulphide-gemini
I really want to sniff Uranus. That would be a fun trip.
(In all honesty I have a slight fascination with gas/ice giant planets. Ever since that one Halo 2 level, I've wished I could visit the atmosphere of one in person.)
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@mott555 go to Yellowstone National Park and visit the geysers. It's not the same, but it's probably as close as you can get, without leaving planet earth.
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@scarlet_manuka said in In other news today...:
The full set of letters is DLOQRSSTZ. If you add one to each letter (wrapping around from Z to A) you get EMPRSTTUA, which can be rearranged as STARTMEUP.
More to the point, the shaded letters in order from left to right are RSZQSLDTO, which can be decrypted using the ultra-secure ROT-1 protocol to read STARTMEUP.
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@scarlet_manuka said in In other news today...:
Uh, "where it goes" is basically "around and around". You're not going to be changing that very much.
As I understand, in most orbits, satellites are required to have thrusters so they can correct their orbits periodically, and deorbit themselves (or in case of geostationary satellites move themselves into a junk orbit) at the end of their functional life.
These thrusters could be used to redirect a satellite onto a collision course with another satellite. However doing so would require very detailed knowledge of the orbit of both satellites, and for the collision to occur before anyone has noticed you've hacked anything.
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@pleegwat said in In other news today...:
These thrusters could be used to redirect a satellite onto a collision course with another satellite. However doing so would require very detailed knowledge of the orbit of both satellites, and for the collision to occur before anyone has noticed you've hacked anything.
Even then, I think they'd only have enough delta-v to reach satellites in a very similar orbit, which means you'd have a collision of maybe a few meters per second which isn't what most people think of when they mention orbital collisions. More of a mildy-destructive "bounce" than a "collision".
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@mott555 said in In other news today...:
Even then, I think they'd only have enough delta-v to reach satellites in a very similar orbit
Actually, causing the satellite to blow up and scatter shrapnel in its approximate orbit is about the worst possible outcome, since that poisons that orbit and many similar ones against reuse for quite a long time. (The higher, the longer; high orbits decay far more slowly than low ones.)
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@dkf Dag nabbit I'm at work and now I want to play Kerbal Space Program.
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@mott555 said in In other news today...:
@dkf Dag nabbit I'm at work and now I want to play Kerbal Space Program.
- You're welcome
- I do not believe KSP models orbital decay. Or space junk fragments in sufficient quantity.
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Maybe there is some kind of hope for Windows Phone
Surface Phone speculation spurred by new phone APIs in Windows
The new APIs aren't just for cellular data, but telephony, too.
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@timebandit I think they were aware that they were in a PR hole, and needed a serious product unveiling to have any hope of getting back in the market. Though I thought these double-screen folding phones were meant to be more educational...
But at the same time, Windows is just going to have telephony APIs. Even just the next Hololens version would be enough reason to have them. The goal with 10 was to limit the platform to a specific form factor less, after all.
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@scarlet_manuka said in In other news today...:
That one was pretty weird since it shouldn't have had to go outside our Exchange server.
I remember one particular email back in the days when email was one step removed from bang-path addressing, and you could still see headers from every step as it was handed from one computer to another along the Internet backbone. This email went from Perdue University to ucbvax (UC Berkeley) in 2 seconds, ucbvax to my employer's mail gateway in 2 minutes, and from the mail gateway to my inbox in 2 hours.
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@hardwaregeek The headers are still there, but there's far fewer intermediate jumps usually. Still, they indicate when the message arrived at the sender and receiver's email providers, giving some proof that an email wasn't backdated.
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@pleegwat said in In other news today...:
far fewer intermediate jumps usually
Yes. I typically see headers from servers in the source and destination domains, but no relays in between, because that's all just packet switching, not mail relaying, these days. Unless it's a spammer trying to disguise the mail's true origin.
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@magus said in In other news today...:
But at the same time, Windows is just going to have telephony APIs.
Maybe this is just to add support to Cortana for making VoIP calls, just like Google home does
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
Actually, causing the satellite to blow up and scatter shrapnel in its approximate orbit is about the worst possible outcome, since that poisons that orbit and many similar ones against reuse for quite a long time. (The higher, the longer; high orbits decay far more slowly than low ones.)
will we get to a point that we can't launch anything because of space junk? is there any prediction of when it will happen?
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@sockpuppet7 said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
Actually, causing the satellite to blow up and scatter shrapnel in its approximate orbit is about the worst possible outcome, since that poisons that orbit and many similar ones against reuse for quite a long time. (The higher, the longer; high orbits decay far more slowly than low ones.)
will we get to a point that we can't launch anything because of space junk? is there any prediction of when it will happen?
Shields up! (we will have shields by then, right? Right??)
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@sockpuppet7 said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
Actually, causing the satellite to blow up and scatter shrapnel in its approximate orbit is about the worst possible outcome, since that poisons that orbit and many similar ones against reuse for quite a long time. (The higher, the longer; high orbits decay far more slowly than low ones.)
will we get to a point that we can't launch anything because of space junk? is there any prediction of when it will happen?
Most satellites are in low earth orbit, where there's still quite a bit of atmospheric drag, so old broken stuff falls out of the sky constantly. If they did a moratorium on space launches for (number straight from my butt) 10 years or so, a lot of it would clear up.
Medium orbit and geosync are a different story, however.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
I've seen an SMS be delayed for around 9–10 months. It was really confusing, as it meant that the lady who'd sent it (and who was subsequently about to visit us) delivered something that sort of made sense but didn't actually and really just confused everyone when we phoned her up to discuss what she meant. Once we figured out that it was from the summer before, everything became much clearer.
Wow you win. My record was 2 weeks.
The fact that everybody on this forum has a story about a long-delayed SMS kind of goes to show you shouldn't rely on them for anything critical.
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@mott555 said in In other news today...:
Even then, I think they'd only have enough delta-v to reach satellites in a very similar orbit, which means you'd have a collision of maybe a few meters per second which isn't what most people think of when they mention orbital collisions. More of a mildy-destructive "bounce" than a "collision".
Not to mention there's no way the satellite's guidance system is precise enough to even hit a 1-meter target. Generally, if it hits the desired orbit "within 1-2km" they consider that pretty on-the-ball.
If it had like the short range radar designed for docking two ships, it could perhaps pull it off, but only if it mostly matched orbits with the target first. Which is already unlikely, since like you said, they don't carry much fuel.
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Back when I had Windows Mobile, although it normally wouldn't let you add the same recipient twice, it did let you copy-paste the SMS recipients field into itself. So, a few cycles of copy-paste, and I put a friend of mine in the list somewhere around 1000 times, and sent him a text.
He received a text message every few seconds for the next 3 - 4 hours. And every time he received a text, his phone would cancel whatever it was doing (SMS composer, even phone calls! This was in the flip phone days, pre-iPhone) to show the new (duplicated) message. :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_closed_eyes:
He should have beat me for that. I wouldn't have even fought back because I deserved it.
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@timebandit Are you sure Cortana can't? I expect they'd use Skype to make that work, since that's their VoiP client.
Cybersecurity and the New Era of Space Activities
